2011/SessionIdeas
= Session Ideas = We would love to use the wiki as a place to collaborate together around ideas for discussion at the next CLS. To add an idea do this: # Edit this page. # Add your idea to one of the sections below - be sure to add your session name (make it bold by highlighting and clicking the 'B' icon) and also add your name. # If you want to go into more detail, make the session name a link to a new page and add further details. :-) Have fun! Topics you'd be interested in running These are sessions you are volunteering to run at the event. Remember, CLS is an unconference, so be sure to add your session idea to the schedule quickly or you might miss the slot! *'Making Communities More Personal' - Jono Bacon - a session to discuss how to transform larger communities (or smaller ones) into more personal entities where there is a real feeling of a human connection and collaboration. **''Awesome topic, if I do my my lightning talk on 'splitting into subgroups' I'll be sure to reference this session - Martijn Verburg.'' *Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware - Marc Laporte - a session to present Tiki and to discuss how this can be a valuable open source platform to support/organize your communities. Tiki is Software made the Wiki Way and offers hundreds of built-in features. (This will be Sunday, after the lighting talk about it). *'Building a new community' - Francois Marier - buildling a community around a new project isn't just about putting a tarball on a website and then watching the patches roll in. (For some reason, it doesn't quite work like that.) I'd love to hear from people who were there in the early days of their project and who would be willing to share their experience on what worked (and what didn't) and what they think helped in crossing the chasm between a hobby project and a community project. **''Is this specifically for open source projects? - Martijn Verburg *'Offline Communities to Online Tribes''' - Maryam Webster - Taking regional service based businesses with a following, from limited to unlimited engagement by bringing their loyalty tribes online. This session is aimed at sharing ways to do this effectively and profitably, startup opt-in events that work, and increasing global community engagement for the local or regional service business. I'd love to have people share best practices, what's working and what isn't & how your community handles large transitions. *'Learn Tech Management in 45 Minutes' - Sumana Harihareswara - Summary of my master's in tech management. Covers the innovation S-curve, how to deceptively increase your department's budget, suit-friendly presentations, drivers vs. supporters, opportunity cost, and more. *'The Art of Extension Communities' - Ross Turk - Allowing outsiders to build extensions on top of your project creates a new class of community members. Your extension creators aren't part of your project's core development team, but they're not users either...they're something different entirely. I'd like to talk about how to nurture extension-based communities. *'Communicating Change' - What should you say and when? Sarah Manley & Sannse Carter - Interfaces change, new products appear and disappear - change is simply a part of all online communities, but what is the best way to communicate this to your users? Some sites have betas, some simply flip the switch. Lets discuss best practices for rolling out change as well as when, how and where to communicate it. *'Growing your effectiveness as an Organizational Influencer' - Pascal Pinck - How can I get others to listen to my ideas? How can I build momentum towards a common goal? How can I encourage people to collaborate across silos when I have no formal authority over them? These are some of the tougher questions in business and organizational life today. In this session, we'll learn some techniques and practice ways of thinking that can help us increase our effectiveness in this vital area. *'Leading Community When You're a Company of One' - Aaron Hockley - Business owners who are their entire company (so-called "solopreneurs") become their own community managers by default. As a photographer, I've attracted a community of fans/followers/clients. I'm interested in exploring the ideas around managing one's community base as a company of one. I don't have all the solutions, but I can share a few things I'm doing and I look forward to hearing what others are doing as well. *'What the heck do you actually do?' - Evan Hamilton - We talk a lot about high-level concepts of community management, but frequently I find community managers don't know what other community managers actually DO day-to-day, and are afraid to ask. Let's share the big programs we're doing, the daily stuff we have to deal with, and what we'd like to be doing. The more we share, the more we can all improve. *'Not In Our Communities, You Don't!' - Michael Schwern & friends - We, the community leaders, will no longer tolerate poisonous behavior in our communities. Let's discuss what actions oganizers and leaders can take to make their communities safer; ways of dealing with specific types of incidents; ways of winning hearts and minds in the wider community. Specifically off topic is whether all this is necessary (you're welcome to propose another session!) *'Recognizing Contributors' - Jane Wells - It seems like every community manager I talk to struggles with the best way to recognize and reward community contributions. Using social capital as the "payment" is fairly universal, but what are the ways different communities are paying out, and are they working to keep community members excited about contributing/proud of their contributions? *'The Role of Visuals in Online Engagement '- Nancy White Building of playing with interactive whiteboards for synchronous events, the power of visually-linked groups such as Flickr 365, etc, thinking together about how to steward technology and practice to make it easier to use visuals in our groups/communities/networks online (and I'm NOT talking about the glut of infographics, but more participatory approaches)! *'Community Management (a) Common-Pool Resource Management - '''Vaitheeshwar Ramachandran - A session about Community Management - It is the management of a common resource or issue by a community through the collective action of volunteers. Examples include the management of open source software. A basic knowledge of this is necessary for everyone involved in community. *'Socializing Effective Community Management Across Organizations - Sam Eder - In this session I'd like us to tackle strategies for ensuring utlization of quality community management in multi-community organizations. How do you make sure the entire organization is making the most of their communities? How are community managers being trained and assessed? How are community managers being integrated into management or career-pathed to strategic positions within an organization? *'''Forum Anti-spam Best Practices - Matt Bidinger - Every minute spent countering those who wish to exploit our communities is a minute not spent improving our communities. Tools to exploit the online forum communities we develop become more advanced every day. Applications like "X rumer" especially take forum spam to a massive commercial scale, highlighting the inadequacies of automated anti-spam measures like recaptcha/Q&A/Image verification. I'd like to raise awareness of formidable countermeasures thru presenting a brief intro of 1 common yet effective anti-bot measures, and 1 novel yet fairly effective solution, then open the floor for sharing what other communities have found to be effective in eliminating these distractions from their daily productivity cycle. Topics you'd like to see If you're interested in something, can't present it, but would love someone else to do so, list it here. * Social Media Metrics for Communities - ??? - what are the latest ideas and tools to measure a community in the various social media utilities and how does that data measure the health of a community? ** I'd love to be involved, or host if nobody else wants to. - Evan Hamilton ** I'd also love to be involved - Matt Bidinger *'Dawn Foster's & Dave Neary's Community Statistics Dashboard' -- as described in Foster's Open Source Bridge session and ready soon! * Best Practices to Increase Community Engagement and Encourage Volunteerism '- ??? - what to do with large communities whose members initially gathered for a specific, compelling reason but despite the usual tactics, are not participating in forums or activities offered. How can a contest be held if no one participates? Or a survey? Or if even free community calls are poorly attended - and always by the same two or three people? These and related problems beset all communities as engagement practices and volunteer solicitations which formerly worked well, now do less and less well. Come, experts - room for more than one here - enlighten us! ** We recently went over this topic at an Oracel User Group / Java User Group meeting for the EMEA region, I can pass on some of those findings - always keen to hear more as well. - Martijn Verburg * '''Does Gamification Work to Increase Engagement? ' ** This is similar to Martijn's topic, but I'm specificially wondering how gamification, including badging works to increase engagement for enterprise software users. My team has been thinking about this for a while. Interesting that's it's just in the news today for Google: http://meta.gamify.com/questions/587/how-would-you-gamify-google-news. Very interested in your experiences - Laurie Pattison *** I would be interested in hearing from Wikia on this subject as well. ~~ MarkDilley * '''Moving from a one-company project to a community-led project - ??? - many software organizations first dabble in Open Source by releasing the code to one of their existing products under a free license. While it provides end-users with essential freedoms and is generally a good thing, there are many benefits to switching to a model where the project is led and driven by a community of people. I'd love to hear from others who have made the transition from a company-led project to a true community one. (Suggested by Francois Marier) * Global collaboration success strategies - ??? - Large projects frequently have interested volunteers from around the planet, which means multiple time zones, languages, and cultures. Ideas about how to coordinate meetings and extend different collaboration tools to a wide variety of people could be very helpful as projects grow in size and number of participants. How do you handle multiple-language issues? How do you ensure someone feels a valuable part of the community even if they're on the opposite side of the world from most people? ** (Stephen Spector) I have been active lately in setting up a global team of community volunteers for OpenStack and connecting them with each other. I can take you through the concept and execution for this process. If you are interested, I can lead a session on this. <stephen.spector@openstack.org> ** I've got a couple of tips to share from running PCGen & Ikasan EIP - also keen to learn more about this!'' - Martijn Verburg ** I've created and mentored businesses in creating educational and affinity communities that have been "global village" in nature, and would be happy to discuss focus group findings, codified fellowshipping practices, masterminding ongoing engagement and "the language issue" which each community tackled in its turn. I'm keen to learn from others as well. - Maryam Webster ** I'd like to contribute this session by asking "Are we really international?" Not just the technical problems of timezones or the multi lingual platforms, but we should ask ourselves that do we need to do something about ourselves to be more multi-cultural... - loker 20:36, July 22, 2011 (UTC) * '''Coordinating software change with the community' - ??? - Any successful, long-lived project has to cope with change, and such change can't entirely come from universal community consensus. Working groups tend to form -- but they often coordinate and work offline (with "sprints") or by email. This work can't exist forever in that vaccuum, so the group presents progress back to the community. Such "progress updates" often spark confrontation. The working groups get frustrated when community stakeholders who feel left out of the process criticize details of the group's work. This interaction is demotivating to the people in the working groups and the community members. Many community members see the working groups as exclusionary, especially because not every stakeholder has the means or time to participate in them. Is there a better way to have stakeholders and working group participants plan and interact, before, during, or after "sprints"? (Posted here by David Strauss, a contributor to the Drupal project) ** Would love to know how people have made this fit with Agile. - Sumana Harihareswara ** This is an area that I hav ean interest in (my community group has recently gained a seat on the Java Community Process committee and we're working on this exact problem with Java standards work) ''- Martijn Verburg ** At WordPress our working groups do all communication publicly on group blogs or in IRC, so the broader community doesn't have much room to resent them, since getting involved is as easy as leaving a blog comment. We have bigger challenges with keeping a strong connection between the core team and the working groups (mostly failing there right now), and with community resentment of the core team over various decisions because some (vocal) community members don't think the core team gives community opinions (in many cases single opinions) the recognition/weight they deserve. - Jane Wells * '''Handling bullies in the community' - In most communities of any size, bullies will appear. Resentments grow, contributions are diminished, and lines are drawn in the community. How can we effectively handle bullies in our open source communities, while keeping the technical contributions they bring? - Andy Lester ** I have extensive experience with this and would be happy to share my tips and ops manual outtakes on "dealing with antagonism". Also, if anyone is interested, do hotseat coaching on a particular problem with @Andy or anyone who has a pressing issue that might be illustrative to the group as a whole - Maryam Webster ** Related links about Difficult People * WikiAsCommunity Long lasting community using wiki as a way to communicate and build over longer distances of time and place. ~~ MarkDilley * A few thoughts on social change movement HR strategy http://jstahl.org/archives/2011/07/19/social-change-movement-hr-strategy/ - how do we view this from a long now view. Much of the movement is burn and churn. Discuss. ~~ MarkDilley (discussed on G+) * What to do as a new community manager joining a company/group with a lot of customers already - Building community from scratch is hard, but nice because you have a blank campus. Where I get stuck is when you already have many, many customers. They're not already formed into much of a community...so how do you get them there? How do you wrangle all these folks? Are these the right folks? Would love to hear from someone who has done this. - Evan Hamilton * Leadership in Emerging Trends - Within mature communities (For instance, 5-10yrs of successful self-supporting forum discussions) how do you support discussion and focus on emerging trends? Forum communities can tend to develop a nose to the grindstone daily approach reproducing, explaining, and sharing past experiences and knowledge. Within communities that have established a name for themselves across a certain market, how do we ensure our communities evolve to address and continue their leadership in emerging trends? What more can we do to support our communities in building organic discussion of emerging trends within our markets? - Matt Bidinger